Beginner SEO Tips for Fashion Bloggers

When you take a look at your analytics, where is most of your traffic coming from? For many blogs, as much as 50% of traffic can come from search engines. With IFB, 44% of our traffic comes from Google organic search, and 4% comes from Twitter. A majority of fashion bloggers (myself included) tend to focus on social media to build traffic. Social media is wonderful but it's time consuming, needy, and when compared to SEO, the return on investment is quite dismal.

Social media is wonderful, but it’s time consuming. When compared to SEO, the return on investment is quite dismal.

Not only that, Social media tends to bring in more returning visitors… our “New Visitor” rate among social media sources hover around 30%, and SEO brings in nearly 70% new visitors. Traffic that comes in without constant attention. So in a sense, when half your traffic is coming from SEO and it's reaching 70% new visitors… it's a marketing tactic that reaches a new audience can't be ignored.

Don't ignore SEO…

It's complicated. Technical. Often times the best resources are written using a lot of jargon. It makes my eyes glaze over, to tell the truth. Kind of like flossing, it's one of those things that isn't hard and I should do it, but don't do it as much as I should. When the numbers “without trying” so hard are looking good, why not try maximize the benefits by tweaking content?

But not to worry! There are ways to jump in to the SEO game. I recently found the Beginners Guide to SEO which had a lot of great information, not to mention great ways of thinking about search engines to improve my tactics.

Think about how YOU use search engines

If I'm treating Google as the source of my answers, why not treat my posts like answers to those questions?

It's funny that we think of SEO is a technical thing, but at the same time it's a tool we all use. I search for specific content on search engines every day. From asking dumb questions like, “What's the difference between a food processor and a blender” to finding reviews on beauty products to decide what to buy, Google answers all my questions. If I'm treating Google as the source of my answers, why not treat my posts like answers to those questions? The Beginners Guide to SEO, broke it down like this:

Search engines are answer machines. When a person looks for something online, it requires the search engines to scour their corpus of billions of documents and do two things – first, return only those results that are relevant or useful to the searcher’s query, and second, rank those results in order of perceived usefulness. It is both “relevance” and “importance” that the process of SEO is meant to influence.

The guide goes in depth into keywords and linking, which is vital to SEO, but I feel like when starting out, it's good to create authentic content that's also SEO friendly. If you're thinking about how to position yourself in a place to be found on the web, it changes the way you think about your content. It doesn't have to change, just tweaked.

Look at your site like a search engine

I'm a visual person. You can explain all you want, ie, search engines don't see photos or flash files. But seeing how your site looks to a search engine certainly changes the way you look at your site. All those untitled images? Vague post titles? One wake up call for me was checking IFB on seo-browser.com

Here is how IFB looks like to a search engine:

I noted which content is being pulled and how the search engines scan the site. Note how the navigation is right on top (a reason to pay attention to navigation). IFB needs work, but scrolling down, it was good to see the links, and looking at the links bare on the page helped to visualize the importance of being specific (and appealing) with your post titles, and any link really…

Obviously, there is so much more to optimizing your blog for search traffic, so please read the Beginners Guide to SEO for getting in depth from experts. But in the mean time, start approaching your blog's SEO like an an answer to be found, and you'll start seeing the difference.

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WOW, I just checked my site too on the SEO Browser and I must say that I was impressed to see my blog post titles in it and also my pictures. I aim to do more to improve it but it is nice to see that I am on the right path.

Wow, this was beyond eye-opening. I needed this 101 badly! Although when I try to plug in my blog url I get an “Unable to Retrieve Web Page” message on seo-browser.com after clicking on “Simple.” Will look into it and study this information like a text book. Thanks Jennine!

Seriously, THANK YOU for this post. I have been trying to strengthen my SEO skills lately. I find when trying to do research online the articles I read talk to me as though I’m already an expert in SEO. This causes me to look up even more terms just to understand the article. I’m definitely going to checkout this book and the seo browser for some tweaking of my blog.

You are all God-sends. Whenever I feel discouraged about blogging, uninspired, lacking motivation and consumed with frustration. I come to IFB for a therapy session, you all help me each and every single time. It’s amazing how you all already know what what challenges we’re facing and when. I love you guys! Thank you
XOXOXOXOXOXO

Thank you so much! I never really understood SEO and honestly never paid attention to it. A few days back, I sort of filled in words and saw views flowing in. Though they aren’t major but it certainly helps!
So thank you for your posts. Will love more breakdowns on these. 🙂

That is something what i call, stand and deliver, good points shared.
the best one is, if you can see like a search engine then you can make things better for your site or blog. i mean every one now a day’s know about keywords and meta, but this is something which is very basic but very helpful.

I like the valuable information you provide in your articles Jenine! Just want to add one-To be found on the Web and communicate with your customers, you need to speak their language and address their particular needs. It’s much easier to optimize web pages for keywords relating to a niche market’s needs.

This is the best way to explain how SEO works and you have done a good job. SEO strategies have to be fine-tuned to become more relevant and deliver results because of the Panda and Penguin updates. This article will help SEO executives to learn the best technique for increasing website traffic.

This is a great post. I am an SEO guy and I work with a lot of bloggers. Most bloggers think that they know everything about everything, so when I make seo suggestions, they think that they were the ones that came up with the site optimization recommendations. Great post.

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I have just started my blog http://www.sevenswag.com
Your blog is so inspiring that i am literally noting every thing you are mentioning. i LOVE YOUR BLOG and i have to thank you for sharing this with readers and bloggers who are starting out. It is a great help.

Moz’s Beginners Guide is the best place to start if you want to learn about SEO. We just published a post on the 7 of the Best SEO Resources (for beginners) at http://www.seocouture.com/7-of-the-best-seo-resources/. If you are going to do SEO yourself, new bloggers need to remember to be cautious when researching on the web, because there is a lot of bad/wrong information out there that can do some major damage to your site. Great post!

This was soon helpful! I have been wanting to understand SEO from a Fashion Blogger point of view for sooo long and your example of answering a question and labeling photos all made the learning curve less steep! Thanks for sharing your insight! I’m so thankful!!!

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